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HE TENTH REPORT OF THE VERMONT BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. 



THE 



FARMERS DISCUSS EDUCATION 



BY 



President M. H. BUCKHAM. 




BURLINGTON : 

FREE PRESS ASSOCIATION. 

1888. 



FROM THE TENTH REPORT OF THE VERMONT BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. 



THE 



FARMERS DISCUSS EDUCATION 



BY 



President M. H. BUCKHAM. 








BURLINGTON : 

FREE PRESS ASSOCIATION. 

1888. 



THE FARMERS DISCUSS EDUCATION. 

By President M. H. Btjckham. 

In a newspaper report of a farmer's meeting in this State, I find 
that the following resolution was presented for debate : 

Mesolved, That education is as necessary for the Farmers as for any of the 
other classes. 

The report says that the resolution after being fully discussed 
was adopted. I should have very much liked to hear that debate. 
Much good sound sense, I venture to say, got utterance then and 
there. I especially like the form and spirit of the resolution. It 
does not content itself with the usual common-places about the 
benefits of education, or with the statement, which nobody denies, 
that education to be beneficial must be practical, or with criticism 
on prevailing methods of education. It says boldly that education 
is necessary, that it is necessary for all classes, and that it is just 
as necessary for the farmers as for any of the other classes. I un- 
derstand the farmers to say that in their opinion it is just as neces- 
sary for a farmer to be educated as for a lawyer or a minister of 
the gospel. These are brave words. They have the true ring of 
New England intelligence and enterprise. I wonder if any 
voice was raised against the adoption of the resolution, and if so by 
what arguments the opposition was sustained. I can imagine some 
aristocrat in foreign lands or some demagogue in this country se- 
cretly opposing the education of the agricultural class for the rea- 
son that this class, the most numerous in the State, could not so 
easily be held in subjection or managed for political ends if they 
were lifted by education into a sense of their own manhood and 
power. We have heard of a royal governor of Virginia who 
thanked God that there were in that colony no free schools or print- 
ing presses. I have heard in our own time, and in a New England 
State, the doctrine maintained by professed friends of the people, 
that too much education is spoiling the American race for manual 
crafts, and that in the interest of the industrial arts we must call a 
halt in educational progress and go back to the good old notion 
that the three R's give education enough to those who are to work 
with their hands. And worst of all I have heard farmers them- 
selves argue that too much education would educate our young- 
men away from the farm, and therefore ought to be frowned upon 
and resisted. I should have liked to hear, if these views were 
brought forward, how the Vermont Farmers met them in sustaining 
this resolution. I should have liked to hear the outburst of honest 
indignation at the suggestion that men of other classes were debat- 
ing how much education it was safe to let the farmers have without 
danger of losing political control of these same farmers. I think 



VERMONT AGRICULTURAL REPORT. 



there would have been some sport in that meeting if somebody bad 
hinted that the Vermont farmer is a farmer simply because he does 
not know enough to be anything else. 

But this resolution, is, as I take it, always in order in any meet- 
ing of farmers. I beg leave to offer it again to this meeting: 

" Resolved, That education is as necessary for Farmers as for any of the 
other classes." 

I maintain the affirmative of the resolution, Mr. Chairman. First, 
because education is necessary for maintaining the respectability and 
dignity of the class of farmers. The New England farmer belongs 
by right of inheritance to an educated class, and he ought never to 
forget it or suffer it to be forgotten. He is the descendant of a race 
of men who were themselves educated, and who took great pains to 
transmit institutions and traditions of education to their posterity. 
The early settlers of New England, the founders of its social and 
political institutions, were picked men. They were not ordinary 
emigrants, failures in their native land, soldiers of fortune, as are so 
many colonists. They were very largely men and women of good 
birth, of good education, of gentle manners, carrying with them high 
conceptions of what a Christian social and civil life requires and im- 
plies. A highly significant fact is the large proportion among the 
early immigrants of college bred men. It has been ascertained that 
in the first twenty-five years of the New England settlements at least 
a hundred graduates of Oxford and Cambridge were among the col- 
onists. And when we remember that in these men high moral and 
religious characteristics were joined with intellectual attainments 
and gave them direction and force, it ceases to be a wonder that they 
laid so wisely the foundations of government and society, and incor- 
porated such noble ideas of liberty, of education, and of morality, 
into the framework of social life. From such a select, such, in the 
best sense, an aristocratic ancestry the New England farmer is de- 
scended. All through New England history the influence of such 
an ancestry has been effective in keeping up the intellectual and 
moral standard of New England farm life. The traditions, usages, 
modes of thought, opinions, prejudices even, of the New England 
farmers as a class, have been those, not of an illiterate, but an educa- 
ted class. The books they have had in their houses, the sermons 
they have listened to, the discussions on public questions in the farm- 
ers' door yard, on the meeting-house steps, round the stove of the 
country store in winter, all proclaim them a reading, thinking, intel- 
ligent class of people. And for this reason they have always been 
a respected and a self respecting class. They have always held up 
their heads in the presence of any other class. Socially they have 
been accounted the equals of any other class. Their sons have mar- 
ried the daughters and their daughters the sons of merchants, pro- 
fessional and literary men, without suspicion of inequality. There 
has never been a longer step to any office or dignity from the farm 
house than from any other house in the land. 

Now let me ask you to consider what the effect would have been 
if the class of New England farmers had begun their career in this 



THE FARMEKS DISCUSS EDUCATION. 



country and continued it under different auspices and influences, if 
they had not inherited from an educated and self respecting ances- 
try those traditions and opinions which foster intelligence and re- 
flection and independent judgment among farmers as a class. In 
the agricultural laborers and peasants of the old world, in the poor 
whites of our Southern States, behold your answer. And the effect 
would be the same here and now, if farmers as a class should abandon 
their inherited and time honored principles and suffer themselves and 
their posterity gradually to sink to the level of an uneducated class. 
They would lose their social status. They would lose their own self- 
respect. They would become an inferior class. Next to genuine 
Christianity, the parent of all true democracy, there is no such level- 
ler as education. It levels up and not down. On the broad table- 
land where religion and education bring together in equality and in 
co operation the true aristocracy, the New England farmer has hith- 
erto had a recognized place. May he never lose it. 

I am in favor of the farmers' resolution, secondly, because educa- 
tion isnecesaary to the farmers in order that they may hold their own 
amid the sharp competitions of modern life. If competition is the 
life of business, there is no lack in our time of that which makes bus- 
iness lively. To do any kind of business in our time is to be obliged 
to do it in the face of eager competitors all around, and woe to the 
man who enters the competition without the requisite training and 
capacity. It is in vain to decry this universal spirit of rivalry, and 
to wish ourselves back in the slow old fashioned times. We must 
make the best of wbat seems to be a permanent characteristic of civ- 
ilization. 

Until comparatively recent times the New England farmer has 
felt the force of competition to but a limited extent. Every farmer 
had about the same ways of doing things, with almost uniform 
results. A moderate and safe competence was assured to him. He 
had no need to disquiet himself over the fluctuations incident to 
other employments ; he had no need to be in a great hurry about 
anything. Summer and winter, seed-time and harvest, were among 
the surest and most regular things in nature. Some farmers were 
a little richer than others, some a little poorer, but none were really 
rich and few positively poor. But all this is now changed. Com- 
petition has at la«t reached the farmer. The extension of markets, 
the opening up of the West, the facilities of transportation, the 
influence of foreigners eager to own land and ready to sell all its 
produce but the merest parings, have cut away the broad and easy 
margins between cost of production and market-value out of which 
the old New England farmer got so comfortable a maintenance. 
Farming, like other kinds of business, must now get its profits out 
of fractional advantages. System, careful calculation, foresight, 
exact business habits, are now as necessary in farming as in other 
pursuits. And here is where education tells, and here is one good 
reason why education is as necessary to the farmers as to any of the 
other classes, because all classes alike yield their prizes to the most 
capable, and leave to fall out by the way those whom Carlyle calls 



VERMONT AGRICULTURAL REPORT. 



the unable. .Farming is coming to be more and more a bus ; nes=s, a 
matter of contrivance, of ways and means, of adaptations and adjust- 
ments, in short an art and not merely an industry. Success depends 
almost if not quite as much on what the farmer does in his office as 
on what he does in the field. Intelligence is the farmer's best 
implement, and best hand, and best fertilizer. It cannot supply 
the place of capital, but it doubles the value of capital. It cannot 
do away with the necessity of labor, but it makes every stroke of 
labor tell for more. 

But granting the value of intelligence, does it follow, asks some 
one, that education, the education gotten in schools and from books, 
is of any great avail in practical farming ? Are the best educated 
men in any town always the best farmers 1 The answer to this fair 
question is that while education counts for something and for a 
good deal, it does not count for everything, Success is a sum total 
made up of a good many items. Ancestry, hea th, native endow- 
ments of body, mind and will, good training in habits and princi- 
ples, good sense, all these things and many others by their com- 
bination make up success or failure. Education is an important 
factor in the problem but is insufficient to secure success without 
combination with others. Education combined with poor endow- 
ment, or deficient energy, or ill regulated habits, or scant good 
sense, is not a match for a large amount of these elements com- 
bined with a limited education. The fair way to put the question 
is whether, taking each man as he is, education adds something to 
what he would be without it, or adds enough to pay for its cost. 
On that point the judgment and experience of mankind are clear 
and decisive. The average educated man in any pursuit whatever 
is superior to the average uneducated man. And especially as pro- 
ducer, as creator of wealth, the educated man is by many degrees 
the superior of the uneducated man. Philosophy, observation, 
statistics have confirmed each other in putting that statement 
beyond dispute. And inasmuch as other vocations are to a large 
extent availing themselves of this principle, and are calling to their 
aid the best systems of education that can be devised, the farmer 
also, who would make the most of himself in his calling, needs 
education, and the best possible education, in order to maintain 
himself by the side of the men in other callings with whom he is in 
necessary competition. 

I am in favor of this resolution, also, because education is needed 
by the farmer to qualify him for the public duties which he is called 
upon to discharge. A farmer is more than a farmer, he is a man 
among men. Here in Vermont, especially, he is a potent factor in 
all public affairs. Numerically the farming class outvote all other 
classes combined. The votes of farmers decide almost all social 
and political issues. They make our laws, they elect our magis- 
trates, they determine what shall be our school policy. Farmers 
appoint ministers in the great majority of churches, they outnum- 
ber all others on juries, they contribute in short the preponderat- 
ing element in all civil, ecclesiastical and educational affairs. No 



THE FARMERS DISCUSS EDUCATION. 



measure of reform can be put in operation if the farmers as a class 
oppose it, none can fail if they are determined to carry it. If it 
were not that farmers are sure to be found on both sides of every 
public question, we should be in danger of falling under a class 
tyranny. And they have not only the weight of numbers. They 
have also, as possessors of the soil, a sort of prescriptive right to 
say their say and be heard, a kind of territorial authority, which 
other men feel and recognize. A man who owns 200 acres of land 
can stand up among his fellows in town meeting and in a way lord 
it over the shop-keeper, and the citizen. I have already alluded to 
the high standard of intellectual and moral character which the 
New England farmers as a class have hitherto maintained. It is of 
the utmost consequence that this standard should be maintained in 
the interest of good legislation, good civil administration, and good 
morals. Imagine, which may Heaven forbid, that the farms of 
Vermont should one by one, pass into the hands of people of an- 
other race, not having the intelligence and moral characteristics of 
the old-time New England farmer, a race not trained to reading, 
and reflection, and self control, not friendly to schools and acade- 
mies and colleges, so that the farm-homes would be destitute of 
books and newspapers, the vigorous intellectual sermon and the 
stimulating Sunday school instruction be heard no more in the 
country meeting-house. What a change would inevitably come over 
our legislation, our judicial administration, our school system, all 
our public offices ! What a different body our legislature would be, 
what a different kind of men they would choose for judges, what 
justices of the peace would be commissioned, what grand juries ! 
What a riot of free rum, find the consequent assaults, and murders, 
and arson, would there be ! Who of us would want to remain in 
Vermont in such a condition of things'? Though its hills were as 
green as ever, its valleys as smiling, its brooks as sparkling, though 
every prospect pleased, yet should we not, refer some region, 
however unattractive in which men were intelligent, and women 
refined, and society well-ordered, and public offices filled with capa- 
ble men, and the State, in its various functions, administered ac- 
cording to the enlightened policy now estab^shed among the wisest 
and most advanced nations ? 

I hope that this discussion will have prepared us for two prac- 
tical suggestions which I venture to make. The first has reference 
to the public schools of Vermont, especially those in the country 
districts. It seems to be generally admitted that our country 
schools are in a condition of decay. While our graded and union 
schools are kept well up with the best in other States, our disb ict 
schools are, on the average, not only behind those of most other 
Northern States, but are inferior to what they used to be in former 
generations. Now this is a very serious fact for us all to consider, 
and especially serious for the farmers. For these are, in the main, 
their schools. Theirs is the responsibility for their maintenance : 
theirs the shame and loss for their failure : theirs the power to 
make them what they should be. I know that the problem pre- 



6 VERMONT AGRICULTURAL REPORT. 

gents difficulties. The changed character of the population ; the 
increase of villages at the expense of the rural population ; the new 
methods of education favoring the massing of pupils under a gen- 
eral system ; these considerations, and others, have made the prob- 
lem of common school education different from what it used to be, and 
demand if not an entire revolution, yet a reconsideration of our pub- 
lic school system. A Commission of competent men is now engaged 
in maturing a plan which shall meet the demands of the case. Now 
what I would like to say to the farmers of Vermont, if I could get 
their ear, would be this : Meet this coming question with the intel- 
ligence and public spirit with which in past times the farmers of 
New England have always met such questions. Understand that 
the case is urgent ; that one of the vital questions of human welfare 
is before you ; that the character of the country schools determines 
largely the character and standing of your children, of your class, 
and of the general population. If there are men among you who 
look at the question solely with a view to the lowest possible taxa- 
tion, see that the higher and larger aspects of the question get a 
hearing, in town-meeting and elsewhere. Send to the next Legis- 
lature men to whom such a great interest can be safely entrust ed. 
For many years past there has been in our Legislature a conspicu- 
ous dearth of men who have distinguished themselves in their com- 
munities by their zeal in public education, and who could be 
counted on to look carefully after this paramount public interest. 
Conservatism is one of the farmer's virtues ; but do not be too con- 
servative ; do not stand still and let all the rest of the world go by 
jon. If the Commission, or any other competent judges, recom- 
mend any change that seems to be demanded by changes in other 
things, do not cling to any outwprn and obsolete system. Let us 
have in every town in Vermont the best schools that the circum- 
stances will admit. 

The other suggestion pertains to what may be called the "New 
Farming" of our day. Science having introduced improvements into 
almost every other art has at last taken hold of farming, and is work- 
ing vigorously upon some of its great problems. It cannot be 
claimed that science has, as yet, accomplished for agriculture any of 
those wonders which it has achieved in some other arts. Some over 
zealous and hasty advocates of scientific farming have claimed too 
much for alleged discoveries, and the resulting disappointment has 
brought discredit and suspicion upon the whole movement. It is wise 
to be moderate in all our expectations of improvements in agricul- 
tural processes. The gains of the farmer will always be slow, his 
labor will always be heavy, and his utmost reward will be but a com- 
petence. But for a 1 ! that, farming is capable of indefinite improve- 
ment, and we are witnessing in our times a good beginning therein. 
The new fanning is trying to understand the processes of nature in 
order to manage them. "How crops grow," "how plants feed," 
"why rotation is beneficial," these are questions which we put to 
nature in order to be aVe by means of the answers to make larger 
crops grow, and to provide better food for plants, and to make each 



THE FARMERS DISCUSS EDUCATION. 



crop contribute to the next in order. Now an intelligent farmer 
will want to know something about all these researches which are 
being made for his benefit. Horace Mann said that you might hire 
an immigrant to shovel a heap of saud backward and forward all day 
and he would never want to know the use of it, if you only paid him, 
but that you never could* persuade or hire a Yankee to do it. He 
must know the reason of what he is doing. Shall an intelligent farmer 
put a spoonful of some fertilizer in each hill of corn, and not want 
to know something about phosphates, soluble, insoluble and reverted ? 
An expert chemist he cannot well be, and need not be, but he ought 
to know enough so that a pretended chemist, or a humbug com- 
pounder of fertilizers, cannot impose upon him. The New England 
farmer has always been something of a philosopher. There is now 
abundant room and call for his philosophy in investigating, judging 
and testing the many novelties which are recommended to him as 
improvements in farming. This is the farmer's part in the new farm 
ing. The professors' part is to discover the facts and laws of vege- 
table and animal life and to suggest possible applications of them to 
the improvement of plants and animals. It is the farmers' part to 
materialize these abstractions into practical experiments. 

And it ought to cheer and encourage the farmer in his work that 
so much aid is being extended to him in this direction. Twenty- 
five years ago Congress appropriated public lands the proceeds of 
which were to support colleges in which, along with other arts and 
sciences, should be taught " branches of learning related to agri- 
culture and the mechanic arts." Of these colleges, the father and 
constant friend of the measure, Hon. Justin S. Morrill, was able to 
say at a festival in his honor last June, " the land grant colleges are 
now more than equal in numbers to the States of the Union," and 
" with hardly an exception are doing excellent educational work." 
By a recent act known as the Hatch bill a supplimentary grant has 
been made to these colleges for the purpose of maintaining experi- 
mental stations. Our own legislature at the last session made a 
small appropriation in a tentative sort of way, for the same purpose. 
For more than fifteen years the State has maintained this Board of 
Agriculture for the same general purpose. The State University 
has done a large amount of work in the same direction. Besides 
providing the required courses of instruction within its walls, it has 
sent its professors and other experts and specialists throughout the 
State to meet and address the farmers at their homes. It has main- 
tained with increasing success a winter course of lectures to farm- 
ers at Burlington. And this year it has invited to a laboratory 
course all farmers and farmers' sons who will come, offering not 
only free tuition, but all the laboratory facilities and chemicals with- 
out cost. So I am sure that we can now with a very good grace 
advise and urge the farmers of Vermont, and especially the young 
men, the farmers of the coming generation, to acquire some 
knowledge of the new farming, to know something about the phil- 
osophy of fertilization, and rotation, and nutrition, and something 
of the many sciences which enter into the farmer's daily employ- 



VEEMONT AGEICULTUEAL EEPOET. 



ment. If the study he is able to give fchem do nothing else — 
though I am sure it will do much more — it will at least give him 
the self respect which a man feels who knows something of the 
why and wherefore of the operations he engages in, and will make 
him feel that he is something more than a manual laborer, that he is 
an intelligent, reasoning, and therefore ever interested and ever- 
improving student and worker in one of the noblest of all the arts. 



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